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Friday, March 8, 2013

Frolicking with a flat-iron

I have a good friend who grew up in rural Maine.
When she was a young girl life was hard.

Kids today may complain, but they have no clue as to what
real hardship is.

When Betty was a girl there was no television and shoes were
a luxury. She didn’t have dolls and she
didn’t have a lot to eat and she didn’t complain about it.

She once told me a story about how she and her brothers rode
one of their pigs for fun. They rode
that poor pig to death, literally.

That was life and it was what it was.

Don’t get me wrong, Betty had a toy. A toy. It was flat iron . . . attached to a
string. I kid you not! She loved that iron and she dragged Lucivil everywhere she went.

That’s what she named her pet iron – Lucivil; funny name for
a little kid to name a toy.

As she tells it, there was a stray cat that hung around
their home for a while. Betty’s father
told her and her brothers they had better not let that cat in the house because
it was a lucivee.

Okay, so what the heck is a lucivee?

According to early folklorists, Lucivee (or Lusifee) is a malicious
wildcat spirit of the Wabanaki. However, in Indian lore the creature is called
Lox (Luks). Lox shares the characteristic of Lucivee but takes
the form of a wolverine and not a cat. The
confusion for may be that lynx, a wild cat, sounds similar to Lox/Luks and the French-Canadian
word for lynx, is loup-cervier which sounds similar to Lucivee.

I can’t imagine why little Betty would have adopted the name
of an evil native American animal spirit for her pet flat iron. Perhaps, she wanted that poor feral cat so
badly, she pretended that the flat iron was the kitty. I don't know.